Friday, January 27, 2017

Today’s
guest was Bristol writer Mike Manson. Mike has written a number of non-fiction
books about Bristol, including Riot! The
Bristol Bridge Massacre of 1793; Bristol Beyond the Bridge: The Turbulent Story of
Redcliffe, Temple and St Thomas from the Middle Ages to Today, and most recently Vice and Virtue: Discovering the Story of Old Market, Bristol.

It was while researching Bristol’s history
that Mike realised he wanted to take the stories further, and that to do so he
needed to write fiction. His first novel, Where’s
My Money, is set around Bristol’s Nelson Street dole office in the 1970s. It
was one of the books selected for the BBC television programmeThe Books That Made Britain.

Mike’s second novel is Rules of the Road, a quirky coming of age tale set in 1975 about two
young men’s journey across Europe to Greece looking for love and adventure. The
book looks back to the days before Rough
Guides, and to research it Mike and his wife travelled from Montpelier
railway station in Bristol to Albania – without a map or guide book.

Bristol
is very different to what it was when Mike first came here in the 1970s and on
the show we talked about some of those changes. Mike also told us about the
smallest literary festival in the world – ShedFest. ShedFest has been running
for a couple of years now and takes place in the shed in Mike’s garden. A ShedFest
anthology has been published, and now there are plans to move the festival out
to a local restaurant and invite members of the public along.

Friday, January 13, 2017

The closure
of Holloway Prison in July 2016 prompted many people to remember some of the
women imprisoned there since it opened in 1852, amongst them militant
suffragettes. Some of the most well known were Women’s Social and Political
Union leaders Emmeline Pankhurst and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence; Ethel Smyth,
who composed the suffragette anthem, The
March of the Women; and Emily Wilding Davison, who died after running in
front of the King’s horse at the 1913 Derby. Many of these women went on hunger
strike in support of their claim for political prisoner status, and were forcibly
fed.

Although
the hunger strike was the most extreme, there were many other ways in which
suffragette prisoners could defy the prison regime. They talked in spite of the
silence rules; sang suffragette songs; and refused to do the work, such as
making men’s shirts, allotted to them. And like prisoners before and since, they
scrawled messages on the prison walls.

Discovering
graffiti by a suffragette who had previously been in a cell lifted the spirits
of women who came after them. In 1909, after smashing the windows in her cell,
Emily Wilding Davison (1872–1913) was moved to a cell which had been occupied by Bristol
suffragette Lillian Dove Willcox (1875–1963). Here she found the words “Dum spiro spero” on the walls: While I breathe, I hope. Emily Wilding Davison later
wrote, “In the dark punishment cell, to my delight, I found on my wall Mrs Dove-Willcox’s
name and ‘Dum spiro spero’. I added mine and ‘Rebellion against tyrants is
obedience to God’.”

Suffragette
Vera Wentworth (1890–1957)was a
London shop assistant and trade unionist. In 1909 she was the WSPU organiser in
Plymouth. She was an active militant who was arrested many times for breaking
windows and heckling politicians, serving prison sentences in Exeter as well as
Holloway. Vera Wentworth also campaigned in Bristol: in March 1909, she
accosted Liberal MP Augustine Birrell at Temple Meads railway station to ask
him when the Government would give women the vote. She was arrested in Bristol
on 12 November 1909 during disturbances associated with the visit of Winston
Churchill to the city, when she broke windows at the Liberal Club. She went on
hunger strike in Horfield prison and was forcibly fed.

In 1908
she and other women were arrested when they attempted to approach the House of
Commons in a delivery van. Vera was sentenced to six weeks in prison. She was
sent toHolloway, where she was kept in
prison for an extra day for carving “Votes for Women” on the wall of her cell. She
told the Governor of Holloway “that in years to come, when Holloway is in
disuse and is one of the sights of London, visitors will be shown the
inscription, and women, then with the glory of the vote, will shudder and thank
providence that they did not live in these days”.

Sadly,
this cannot be. Holloway prison was rebuilt between 1971 and 1985, and the suffragette
graffiti, if it still existed at that time, was lost for ever. So too was the turreted
gateway from which released suffragettes used to emerge to a heroine’s welcome:
parades, music, banners and flags. But though that Holloway has gone, we can
still be thankful that the days when women were thrown in prison and tortured
with the forcible feeding tube and gag simply for demanding the right to vote,
have gone.

Find out more about Vera Wentworth, Lillian Dove Willcox and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence in the Suffragette Spotlight On...Archive at http://www.lucienneboyce.com/the-bristol-suffragettes/

Reclaim
Holloway: The government is planning to sell Holloway to private developers.
The publicly-owned site’s estimated redevelopment value could reach £2.5
billion. The Reclaim Holloway project has been set up to campaign for the site
to be used instead for council housing and community projects. Find out more
about the campaign at http://reclaimholloway.strikingly.com/

Sunday, January 8, 2017

Today’s
guest was Bristol artist Jenny Urquhart. Jenny creates contemporary, vibrant
paintings of her favourite places, working with acrylic, ink, collage,
computer-based graphics, and photography. She is best known for her paintings of
Bristol scenes with balloons. Her paintings also feature scenes from Devon, Cornwall
and North Wales. One of Jenny’s favourite Bristol subjects is the Bristol
Suspension Bridge.

If
you are travelling through Temple Meads any time soon you will see some of her
work, and that of other Bristol artists, on display in the station.

Jenny
taught biology for ten years before switching careers and painting full time. In
2015 she painted two Shaun the Sheeps for the 2015 Shaun in the City campaign
to raise money for sick children. Her Shauns are Lambmark Larry, which was
displayed in London Paddington Railway Station, and Baalloon, which was displayed
in Bristol.

Jenny
has recently published a Bristol colouring book featuring some of her
best-loved Bristol paintings.

Jenny
is a patron of CCS Adoption (Clifton Children’s Society) which finds homes for
children in the south west. She was recently involved in a massive fund raiser
called “This is Bristol”, when she invited Bristolians to send photos of themselves,
their houses, pets, or favourite Bristol places. She made the photos into a collage
which was raffled off for CSS.

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About Me

I live in Bristol and I write historical fiction and non-fiction. In 2006 I completed an MA in English Literature with the Open University, specialising in eighteenth century literature.
My historical novels are set in the eighteenth century. To date they are: To The Fair Land (2012); and the Dan Foster Mystery Series comprising Bloodie Bones (2015), The Fatal Coin (2017) and The Butcher’s Block (2017). Bloodie Bones was a winner of the Historical Novel Society Indie Award 2016 and a semi-finalist for the M M Bennetts Historical Fiction Award 2016.
The Bristol Suffragettes (non-fiction), a history of the suffragette campaign in Bristol and the south west which includes a fold-out map and walk, was published in 2013.